Paris Hilton — the Hilton hotels heiress, club DJ, reality TV star, and original “famous for being famous” starlet (before the Kardashians took the crown) — made a public stand against the surging proliferation of AI-generated deepfake imagery that is being used to demean women. Standing on Capitol Hill with Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC), Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), and others Hilton lent her Hollywood glamour and star power to the DEFIANCE Act.
Lamenting the “newest form of victimization happening at scale — to your daughters, your sisters, your friends and neighbors,” Hilton stated that “a staggering one in eight girls today are experiencing the harms of AI-generated deepfake porn.”
.@ParisHilton advocating passage of the DEFIANCE Act that would combat nonconsensual deepfake pornography: “Too many women are afraid to exist online, or sometimes, to exist at all… This isn’t just about technology, it’s about power” pic.twitter.com/TQpxct0UjJ
— CSPAN (@cspan) January 22, 2026
[NOTE: DEFIANCE is the acronym for Disrupt Explicit Forged Images and Non-Consensual Edits Act. It’s a bipartisan measure with Senators Dick Durbin (D-IL) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC), and Ocasio-Cortez and Rep. Laurel Lee (R-FL) and many more congress members as cosponsors on both sides of the aisle.]
[Note: It is the rare issue, almost exclusively focused on women’s rights, that puts the liberal AOC and MAGA-aligned Nancy Mace on the same page, though both signed Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie‘s petition to compel the release of the Epstein files.]
The concern is exacerbated by the fact that the AI world is dominated almost entirely by men, who control the levers and the capabilities of the technology, and who have been conspicuously lax in preventing AI’s capacity for abuse.
Most prominent in the headlines has been Elon Musk‘s Grok AI engine, a popular tool with an image-generator feature that was producing deepfakes that that “sparked outrage around the world,” as PBS described it.
In response, Musk put restrictions on Grok’s capabilities, but subsequent reporting showed that Grok “was and still is creating nonconsensual sexualized images.”